First opened Saturday, June 18, 2005
亡くなる
なくなる
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to pass away
Nakunaru is literally “to become not”: the -ku form of 無い (nai, “not, missing”) plus なる (naru).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 亡
In a sentence
最近彼が亡くなった。
He died recently.
老人は今朝亡くなった。
The old man passed away this morning.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “The adverbial -く (-ku) form of adjective 無い (nai, “not, missing, not present”) + verb なる (naru, “to become”): literally, "to become not, to become nonexistent".”
- “The 亡 spelling of the na- root of nai and naku naru is reserved for the meaning of "dead, gone".”
- “Cognate with 無(な)くなる (naku naru).”
Source: Wiktionary: 亡くなる (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.